this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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That is what the culture war is. The effort to create an environment where publishers and artists have a harder time including aspects labeled "woke" because of a loud minority will harass the people involved, review bomb the products, dominate the discourse with bad faith arguments, and generally minimize the potential enjoyment of anyone who is the intended audience. This is what forcing an agenda upon artists looks like.
I think I'm on the other side - I think it's way too much woke agenda in a lot of popular TV shows we watch. Disney competely wrecked a lot of shows because they kept pushing in gender/race related things that felt competely out of place.
I couldn't even watch the acolyte. They wrecked it competely. Many web pages have described what's wrong with it so won't repeat that here, but hopefully you already know what I mean.
If you don't like something, that's fine. They made the product they want, they're free to do that, and you're free to not like it.
Just know that art has always driven social discussion, and it's always been met with heavy social opposition, just usually in the form of outright censorship. So historically artists had to be subtle in order to be critical without being censored. In order to see more edgy stuff you had to go to small, barely funded art house shows.
But then the internet happened, and suddenly artists weren't beholden to a small number of elite entertainment corporations. Art containing more openly progressive ideas can now be shared directly with the masses, the masses are now preferring progressive ideals more than ever before, and naturally corporations making entertainment products now have a financial incentive to cater to that demographic (often called "virtue signaling"). Today you see a mix of corporate pandering and actual art, even within the development teams of a mainstream product like Dragon Age or Disney. Some messaging feels honest, others feel ham fisted because it's pride month.
But the censorship of the pre-internet days existed for a reason. A lot of people feel uncomfortable seeing things that challenge their status quo. People tend to seek comfort, and they just want their entertainment to leave them be. But now that corporate censors are less of a barrier, and now that progressive ideals are proliferating, the people themselves are backlashing. They say things like, "it's way too much woke agenda, I'm tired of it. I want to watch a show without having the story be about woke issues." I think that's also normal.
I think the backlash is two fold: On the one hand, real art challenges the viewer, which can be exhausting when you just want to be entertained before you get a few hours of sleep and go back to work in the morning. But on the other hand, you do have what offen feels like a disengenuous layer of progressive pandering coming from corporations that you never saw before. And no one likes being pandered to, let alone not being pandered to.
I think this corporate pandering towards progressive ideals is new, the terms we use to describe everything are definitely new, but the tendency for art to expose people to progressive ideals and the tendency for the masses to be conservative and resist change are as old as humanity. And I view the two as a social evolutionary yin and yang, keeping each other in check.
But they aren't free -- Disney has total executive control. This is nothing new though; they used to use this power to censor queerness in shows before (e.g. Gravity Falls). They may still perhaps, and may do so again. Disney in general reigns in everything to make it a sterile corporate product and the artists involved have to swim upstream to make something they want.
We should all boycott Disney and take its capitalist grip off our culture. Then we can have vastly more diverse media, certainly with more queerness.
Out of curiosity, did you like Andor? Because it had all that stuff too but it was well written instead. Just think about how many women are lead roles on Andor for a second.